Michael Kernan: The Features of a Born Storyteller

That gaze, that noisy chair.

Finally, Mike returns to the encounter with the monk. His family had decided to entertain themselves on a February Sunday by finding a Russian monastery said to be 20 miles away. Much confusion, much getting lost. And then, as the slush grew deeper and his mother was asking that they turn around, they saw a monk with vast beard and cross, striding toward them, looking nine feet tall.

"I waited for his mouth to open, wondering madly if actual sounds would come out, recognizable words though of course not in any language we would understand, or if, as seemed more likely, an unearthly gonging or the bray of a shofar or simply a cloud of silver flakes would issue from the blackness of that unbelievable, phantasmagoric jungle of hair."

His father leaned out of the window.

" 'Hey Buster,' he said.

"The rest of us froze in horror."

Of course, the monk offers directions. That's the end of the story.

"Well, there it is, and now that I see it in black and white it doesn't look so funny to me, either. Still, as I recall that lost Sunday afternoon, an afternoon that exists now only in the minds of myself and my sisters (unless the monk is alive somewhere, his beard white, his face sunken, his mind as gentle and clear as a summer day even though dimmed now and then by a succession of clouds driven on fierce stratospheric winds unfelt by the watcher). I can conjure up that antic encounter, and I suppose I must resign myself to the realization that it can never be transmitted to anybody else and that in a few more years it will have disappeared utterly, without trace, like a shout."

That was 33 years ago, and of course it still hasn't disappeared. It's right in front of you. People like reading, and remembering, the human interest guys.